Lost and Found: On Eileen Myles’s “Bird Watching”
CAConrad in Praise of the Poet’s Early Work
In 2023, when the lost Beatles song “Now and Then” was released, my aunt Ruth contacted every relative, friend, and acquaintance to announce the very exciting news of The Fab Four’s recovered, final song. She even contacted friends who had become enemies, but her joyous tone about the tune made them all friends again; her enthusiasm danced life back into her body and back into love she had thought lost. The ghost had one more song. It was surreal to me because I remembered their music on the radio as a kid and seeing John and Yoko on TV in their Peace Bed, but Aunt Ruth had most definitely masturbated to at least one, if not all four of their photos, and she was the happiest person I knew in 2023.
The truth is, the Beatles’ song was never lost; it was just unfinished and unused until now. The following year, in September, 2024, Eileen Myles called to say a poem they wrote in the 1970s that had never been published was possibly going to appear in a new book and asked if I would take a look at it. I had no idea what it was going to be! Like the lost Beatles song, this epic poem was actually not lost, just unused until now, and I read it several times in disbelief! This long poem, “Bird Watching,” was a masterpiece!
It felt as if Eileen had found a box of pencils they wrote with in the 1970s and asked if I would like to take a look at them.
I’m a poet, not a critic, which is why this book review is built on enthusiasm! Not to say a poet cannot be a critic, as anyone who has read the critic Alan Gilbert’s extraordinary book of poems, “The Everyday Life of Design,” can attest. It was confusing reading Bird Watching, because it was that youthful Eileen Myles voice we all knew and fell in love with years ago, but the poem was actually new to us! The confusion reminded me of reading Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses in 1990, thinking these were selected, older poems, but they were in fact all new, just written in former styles. Myles strikes moments of breathtaking elevation:
reveal, reveal
or think of yourself as this tree
only putting out leaves
no hiding
just a beautiful remark
on wet living green
It felt as if Eileen had found a box of pencils they wrote with in the 1970s and asked if I would like to take a look at them. When I look in that box, I think about which pencil wrote the poem “Tuesday Brightness,” or another favorite Myles poem, “Exploding the Spring Mystique.” This new release, Bird Watching, is a prequel to some of the most extraordinary books! Now this is becoming a book review, which is fine, whatever, I’m just saying, the Foreword by Rosa Campbell, and the Preface by Eileen Myles set the tone for the historical record. It is especially exciting when the reader learns in the preface that the view from the apartment in 1977 is the same as the one from their apartment and window in 2026. The New York City 3rd Street portal has been used and documented in books and magazines for over half a century. So many brilliant moments in “Bird Watching!” Look at this:
I look in a mirror
& smile at myself
CHANGE SOMETHING
write it in soap
on the mirror
across a smile
then wash my face
think I can’t write my poem all day
can I
may I
may I
O please since
I don’t have a job
What is particularly exciting about the Foreword is the way Rosa Campbell creates a sluice for all the information to slide through, and it’s such a great piece of writing! The important markers are hit, like when John Ashbery published the poem, “An Attitude About Poetry” in The Partisan Review, and you flip forward to page 108 to read the poem, imagining Ashbery seeing it for himself for the first time, saying, “I want everyone to read it!” And we did and do, and love it, “Never drunk but gliding on the / ethers of everyone’s / drunkenness. / It trips me up.”
I want everyone to read this new book, Bird Watching, which not only contains the never-before-published poem “Bird Watching” but also the first three books by Eileen Myles: The Irony of the Leash, A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains, and Sappho’s Boat. In this volume are all the wild, enthused lines, stoked for life’s daily mysteries, and all the tender elevations that we have been used to experiencing in the poetry of Eileen Myles!
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Bird Watching and Their First Three Books of Poetry by Eileen Myles is available from Fonograf Editions.
CAConrad
CAConrad has been writing poetry for over 50 years. Their latest book of poems is First Light (Wave Books / UK Penguin, 2027). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Creative Capital grant, and The Book of Frank is available in a dozen languages, with a forthcoming Korean translation in 2027. They exhibit their poems as sculpture with recent shows in Edinburgh, London, Hamburg, Melbourne, Porto, and Chicago. They teach at Sandberg Art Institute and De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Please visit them at CAConrad.com.
